Remembering the Sacred While Celebrating the Season

“If anyone wants to hold the end of a chain which really goes back to the heathen mysteries,” says G. K.Chesterton in his book Heretics, “he had better take hold of a festoon of flowers at Easter or a string of sausages at Christmas.” Why?

According to Chesterton — himself a convert to Roman Catholicism — everything from from science to the French Revolution is “of Christian origin.” However, he says, “there is one thing, and one thing only, in existence at the present day which can in any sense accurately be said to be of pagan origin, and that is Christianity” — or, rather, Christian ritual and aesthetics.

It isn’t important whether we accept Chesterton’s thesis that Christianity is the sole, and true, representative of a tradition that stretches back into the pre-Christian cultures. However, we should take his suggestion that ancient tradition, consciousness, or the Mysteries, are lived out in apparently ordinary rituals and ordinary things that we might take for grants — flowers, food, etc.

Except in rare circumstances, embodying an authentically ancient or primitive consciousness is probably not possible for us today. We do not face the elements in the same way as ancient man. We do not need to hunt for food, and, indeed, food is always available to us. And few of us live surrounded by nature, days from the nearest city.

Nor, generally, do we have a tribe, or even an extended family. A sense of the sacred is often lacking. Celebrations and seasonal rituals are commercialized and made all about consuming, sales, and overindulgence.

To fill the emptiness in our lives, all sorts of strange religious cults and political movements have sprung up. Their symbolism is often dramatic, alluring, and absolutely in contrast to the ordinary world that we find ourselves in. Often, if these movements re-sacralize the world, it is only through imposing an ideology or symbolic way of understanding it. No matter how encompassing they can be (drawing in material from most world cultures, in some cases), everything is boiled down so that everything represents the same thing.

It is, I believe, essential for us to recover the spirituality of the ordinary; to not impose symbolism on everything, but to allow meaning to arise out of the world and our encounters with it. For many, Christmas or “the Holidays” are about gifts. For others, it’s about religious imagery — Christian, pagan, etc. But what is beyond the imagery? What ordinary things were mythologized and, in a sense, lost to us as sacred experiences in the ordinary world?

Chesterton suggests that the ancient, the sacred, the pagan — perhaps even whatever was before paganism — has been passed down in ordinary things and experiences, e.g., in coming together to eat a meal. This doesn’t sound special. We’ve all eaten around other people that we had little interest in, making small talk to kill the time or just to be polite. Unfortunately, even family events can feel like that.

But we make the experience sacred when we honor the lives of those present — respecting their struggles and achievements — and when we honor the act of coming together as something both ordinary and out of the ordinary — a moment in time that is unique and that will not come again; the meeting of people on different paths, some of whom will one day be known to us only in memories and reflection. We discover the sacred in the ordinary when we become conscious of the vastness of time and honor, as a moment of the vastness, what is here and now.

Practitioner of esoteric spirituality, Dharma, and martial arts, Angel Millar is also an author of books on Freemasonry, the occult, and Islam. His writing has also been published by Quest magazine, New Dawn magazine, and Disinfo dot com, among others. You can find out more about him at AngelMillar.com.

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“If you enter a gathering of people with the words, “Friends and co-workers,” the majority will look upon you with suspicion. But if you dare to call them brothers and sisters, then most likely you will be denounced as having uttered inadmissible terms.
People sometimes establish brotherhoods, but such superficial and pompous institutions have nothing in common with the great concept of Brotherhood. Thus people start communities, cooperatives, various unions and societies; but in their foundations there will not be even simple trust. Consequently, these establishments are very remote from that Brotherhood which would be a strong and steadfast union of trust.”

In turn, to realize brotherhood, we should appreciate our time we have with those we love, do not know, or do not love and have positive fellowship and try to quiet the mind from judgement and expectation of the other.